[sugar] Educational Toolkit

[Deepank Gupta]

Hello,

I am a student at NSIT currently in my third year of undergraduate studies
and have been associated with OLPC for the past one and a half months as a
volunteer developer. I just want to introduce a new project about an
educational toolkit inspired from the needs of students all around. It all
started with a small idea of providing automated tests, but has started to
grow into a multi-dimensional project with comments and ideas from numerous
people including recommendation from Walter himself. Let me introduce with
the basic idea :

The educational toolkit is a software to facilitate discussion in classroom
with the help of technology. It aims at providing teachers and students with
a tool to pose problems, compare and discuss solutions by revolving the
discussion around it in something known as Demo Mode. It can provide flash
cards and other objective and subjective tests that can be used as a formal
testing tool for class tests and quizzes to provide a better gauge of a
student's progress to the teacher.

The software will be developed in Python with emphasis on easy User
Interface and will aim to act like a tool which does not take over the job
of teaching, but promotes natural class-room environment and will aim to fit
in the classroom environment. The choice of Python as a programming language
gives us the power of Object Oriented Design and Implementation along with
lots of libraries and easy integration with Sugar and support for Shared
Activities. You can find more details on the project at the Wiki page along
with the links to technologies in use at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_toolkit  and also find the current
code-base at http://www.nsitonline.in/it/students/2005/deepank/projects.html

Although, the software is still in the planning stages with lots of feedback
and ideas coming in, but, coding has started side-by-side going with the
motto of "Release Early, Release Often". The current code-base is just a
very minimum demo, but the work is going on at rapid pace and it will
increase exponentially over the next few weeks with progress being updated
every week.

Also, I want to take the advise and recommendations of the community on the
following questions :

Q.1 The main difference between the toolkit and other stand-alone activities
will be its integration with Sugar. All the other activities like Read or
games are run on a use-to-use basis. But, this software will be run at all
times in the classroom, since its use in classroom discussion and tests.
What are your views regarding this and what are the best practices to
implement this?

Q.2 I have been a bit confused about the use of platform for the viewer -
PyGTK or PyGame. I have heard from other developers that PyGame is not very
stable at this moment and is not integrated into Sugar by default. Since the
software needs high integration into Sugar, what are your recommendations.

Thanks and Regards
Deepank Gupta
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